randomness

(...to steal a page from matt hickey's book)

1) watching calvin's vid of stoogeaphilia, i'm digging the tortuously melodic beauty of sir steffin's solo on "marquee moon." cat can sure worry them notes nice -- puts me in mind of mike bloomfield on "east-west" (another sterling elektra release). great tone, too. he plays gtr the way beefheart says you oughtta -- "like a drowning man;" with every note he wrings out of his stratocaster, you get the sense that it's for keeps. and then there's ray, blowing bubbles and waving his arms in the air. and on "dog, i wanna be your," the focused power of jon teague's drumming. and matt in his trance.

2) wearing a silly uncle sam hat at work at the market the last two days, it's occurred to me that the best way to make yourself invisible, even to ppl you know, is to wear a costume. besides scaring little kids (who don't understand the idea of costuming, they just see a big weird-looking person), it also causes the majority of adults to avert their gaze when a costume-wearer greets or approaches them. i observed this even with ppl who know me.

3) instead of going to see fireworks, my sweetie 'n' i passed the evening watching the good, the bad, and the ugly (since my middle dtr gifted me the complete "man with no name" trilogy for my b-day). while i still kinda dig a fistful of dollars the most (even with superior cinematography and the first ennio morricone soundtrack to a sergio leone film, the good, the bad etc. still has intervals of self-consciously "weird" or "arty" boo-shee like those that marred for a few dollars more (altho at least the heavy played by lee van cleef doesn't come across like a homicidal version of lorenzo st. dubois from the producers the way the one in for a few dollars more did). having viewed all three of these on successive evenings, i now guess it musta been hang 'em high that i saw in the theater, back in the day.

4) listening to death comes along (thanks to teague, i actually had this before julian cope wrote about it) and thinking about starting a messy, noisy, japanese style psych band. the stoogeaphiles having backed off our level of activity from playing out every month to just four times a year (with, hopefully, more rehearsals in between), and the jam winding down after two yrs (altho i'll still play with lee allen any time he tells me a time 'n' place), i'm thinking i need to find another outlet, and donwanna have to suboptimize (e.g., no more blues jams). the noise i dig to play most of all falls roughly within the territory delineated by punk, funk, psych, and free jazz (touchstones: stooges, early funkadelic, trane's meditations, sonny sharrock's ask the ages), and i'm putting together some scenarios in my head i might try pulling some ppl into once they've had a chance to germinate a while. as it happens, terry valderas is one of those ppl, and i ran into him at the market today. we're supposed to get together for drinks friday evening. film, as they say, at 11.